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4.2-Magnitude Earthquake Hits UK's Kent Area, Hilarity Ensues

Photos of spilled coffee cups took social media by storm

May 22, 2015 13:11 GMT  ·  By
4.2-magnitude earthquake hits Kent, people are not impressed
   4.2-magnitude earthquake hits Kent, people are not impressed

A 4.2-magnitude earthquake shook the county of Kent in the UK this Friday, May 22, at about 3 a.m., and people reacted in the best possible way: they took to social media to laugh the entire affair off. 

The hashtags #PrayForKent and #WeWillRebuild went viral, as did photos of knocked-over garden furniture, spilled coffee cups, water bottles lying on their side, and wheelie bins brought to their knees by the tremor.

If you feel like having a good laugh, tweets showing how devastating the 4.2-magnitude earthquake in Kent was are available below. Be warned though, you might not be able to handle the horror.

As utterly and completely unimpressive as many folks in Kent appear to have found the tremor, it looks like there were also people who were quite spooked by the unexpected shake.

DM tells us of Kent residents whose homes trembled for about 10 seconds and whose pet dogs were left quite distressed by the incident. Some even felt the need to contact local law enforcement officers.

“I was so scared, I was praying it was going to stop, the noise was so loud, like a train going through your house. It's one of the scariest experiences I've ever witnessed,” a 71-year-old man named Terrence Forster told the publication.

The shake was the strongest in years for Kent

Scientists at the British Geological Survey say the 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck at a depth of about 15 kilometers (approximately 9.5 miles) at 02:52 BST (British Summer Time).

The tremor's epicenter was documented at a distance of about 7 kilometers (roughly 4.5 miles) south of the town of Ramsgate. Apparently, it was also felt by people in Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Surrey.

Apart from the knocked-over furniture and dishes that people insisted on poking fun at, the earthquake didn't cause any structural damage to buildings in the affected area. No injuries were reported.

Then again, experts estimate this shake was about 260,000 times less powerful than the devastating 7.8-magnitude tremor that hit the country of Nepal in Asia on April 25.

This quake, followed by a series of aftershocks of which one had a recorded magnitude of 7.3, killed well over 8,000 people and left million others homeless.